Gabon’s Brice Oligui Nguema won 94.85 percent of the vote, according to final results released on Friday, confirming the junta chief’s landslide election as the central African country’s president.
That result marks a five-percent increase on his score in the provisional results given the day after the April 12 ballot, the country’s first since Oligui ended more than five decades of Bongo dynasty rule in his August 2023 coup.
Oligui, who temporarily hung up his general’s uniform to stand for office, was elected president in a single round with 588,074 ballots, according to the electoral commission’s final results.
His main rival Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, the last prime minister under ousted leader Ali Bongo Ondimba, likewise saw an increase in his vote share, coming second with 3.11 percent compared to his provisional 3.02 percent score.
None of the six other candidates broke the one-percent barrier.
Turnout stood at 70.11 percent in an election marking Gabon’s return to constitutional normality and civilian rule after 19 months under Oligui’s military leadership.
No appeal against the election’s fairness and conduct had been lodged within the deadline, the electoral commission added.
While he chose not to appeal against the outcome of the vote, the day after the provisional results’ release Bilie By Nze slammed a “victory snatched away in opaque and contestable conditions” and a lack of equity in the campaign period.
Neither patriarch Omar Bongo, who ruled from 1967 to 2009, nor his son Ali Bongo, ever obtained vote shares as large as that scooped by Oligui, besides the three elections in 1973, 1979 and 1986 where Bongo senior was the sole candidate.
Oligui, who will on Saturday attend the funeral of Pope Francis, is set to be sworn in on May 3 in the Gabonese capital Libreville, according to the presidency.
